Young Japanese-Americans Honor Ethnic Roots

By MIREYA NAVARRO

Published: August 2, 2004

LOS ANGELES - In her rhinestone crown, Nicole Miyako Cherry had an air of royalty as she grabbed a heavy mallet and took a swing at a wooden barrel full of sake during the opening ceremonies of the Nisei Week Japanese festival in mid-July.

Not too long ago, the traditional ''breaking of the sake barrel'' to celebrate a notable event would not have been on Ms. Cherry's to-do list. As a Southern California teenager growing up in the suburban comfort of South Pasadena, Ms. Cherry was into skating on the beach, playing intramural soccer and Boyz II Men.

The daughter of a Japanese-American mother and a white American father, Ms. Cherry, 24, said her integrated lifestyle allowed for few conspicuous ethnic markers other than perhaps wearing a kimono for Halloween or attending an obon festival.

But last year, she competed for, and won, the title queen of Nisei Week, the oldest Japanese-American cultural event in the region.

"If people in my generation don't get involved, who's going to take over?'' she asked.

Ms. Cherry's transformation from typical American teenager to ethnic ambassador is a statement about how young Japanese-Americans have struggled to hold onto an identity of their own. Shrinking population numbers, high intermarriage rates and the legacy of the rush to assimilate after the World War II internment experience created an uncertain cultural path for the sansei (third generation) yonsei (fourth) and gosei (fifth).

Ms. Cherry is among a minority awakening to an unsettling realization - it is up to them to fight the forces of cultural extinction, even if most of them may not speak Japanese, or have visited Japan or, increasingly, even look Japanese.

Gil Asakawa, author of "Being Japanese American," said a reason some young Japanese-Americans are asserting their ethnic identity might be that it has become cool to be Japanese.

"Japanese culture is hip in American mainstream, so the door has been opened for these Japanese-Americans to embrace the culture more,'' said Mr. Asakawa, who said he was jolted into consciousness about his heritage by the death of his father in the early 1990's.

But even as Japan's exports like anime and karaoke, not to mention its influences in food, technology and design, have become popular globally, many among the younger generations of Japanese-Americans say they are also looking in another direction, at what it means to be Japanese-American, not just of Japanese descent. Central to Japanese-American pride is surviving and thriving after the indignities of World War II.

"The culture and the traditional aspects go back to Japan, but I tend to look at the Japanese-American experience - my grandfather being in an internment camp,'' Ms. Cherry said. "That's huge.''

Many other groups also struggle to nourish their ethnic roots, but Japanese-Americans are going about it with a sense of urgency.

The number of Americans who identify themselves as Japanese declined to 796,700 in the 2000 census, from 847,562 in 1990, partly because of low immigration and birth rates. The wave of new immigrants from other parts of Asia, including China, South Korea and the Philippines, now dwarfs Japanese-Americans, who once made up the largest Asian group in the United States.

The trends have left some Japanese-Americans feeling as if they are disappearing.

Although Buddhist temples, sports leagues and families sustain the ethnicity, many longtime Japanese-American organizations and institutions are losing members or eroding. Only three Japantowns are left in California, where there had once been dozens.

And "outmarriage,'' mostly to whites and other Asians, is diluting the ethnicity to the point that Larry Hajime Shinagawa, director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity at Ithaca College in New York, said most Japanese-Americans face only two directions - assimilating into "whiteness'' or adopting a "pan-Asian'' identity.

But that kind of obliteration is not yet evident in people like Ms. Cherry, who just spent a year immersed in all things Japanese (tea ceremony, kimono etiquette, a visit to Japan) or at places like the University of California, Los Angeles, where taiko drumming is suddenly the rage.

With an undergraduate student body that is about 41 percent Asian-American, there is a dynamic pan-Asian youth culture on campus, said Don T. Nakanishi, director of the Asian American Studies Center, but half of more than 60 Asian-American student groups are still "ethnic specific.''

Among these is the Nikkei Student Union, formed when Japanese-American students predominated among Asians enrolled at U.C.L.A. and now open to "anyone interested in Japanese culture,'' said Tracy Ohara, 22, a past president.

One member, Jason Osajima, 19, said his parents sent him to Japanese-American "cultural summer camps'' and basketball leagues as a child, but that he grew up mostly with Caucasian friends and not particularly connected to his Japanese side. But last fall, when he enrolled as a freshman, he said, "I realized I really wanted to get involved with the Japanese community.''

"Before college, I didn't realize how important that was, but in college you have so many cultural resources,'' he said.